CLAY: We are joined now by Congressman Jim Jordan, who I believe has occasion to listen to this show sometimes while he’s out and about driving in his district.

REP. JORDAN: (chuckles) I do. Yeah.

CLAY: How excited were you when the news came down, not only that this judge has had the courage to issue this 59-page ruling but also that suddenly the Biden administration having reviewed it said (summarized), “Eh, she did a pretty good job here. Let’s use her as the reason why this mask mandate is gonna end”? How much did you enjoy it?

REP. JORDAN: Right. No, I did particularly because personally I flew this morning. So, I just got… I had to fly through Charlotte and from Charlotte down to Florida; so I flew this morning, and it was so refreshing to get on the plane, 90% of the people now aren’t wearing masks. I think someone told me they tweeted out today, for everyone…

They’re gonna go in an airport. Everyone who’s not wearing a mask they’re gonna go up and ask them, are you registered to vote, just to make sure, ’cause we figure those people are Republican voters anyway. So, no, it was great. This is freedom wins and Fauci loses. Common sense wins and the ridiculous CDC with some of the things they’ve been doing on this loses as well. Great day for America. Great day for freedom.

BUCK: Congressman Jordan, I gotta ask you what you think the Democrats’ play is gonna be going forward here when it comes to covid restrictions and just more generally. I haven’t even heard what the narrative is supposed to be yet. I don’t even really pick up… They trot out a little bit of January 6 and insurrection stuff here and there —

REP. JORDAN: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: — and that’s not gonna cut it with inflation at 8.5%, with a wide open southern border, with crime, violent crime increasing rapidly in cities. I think it’s important that we know what their pitch is gonna be or how they’re gonna try to play this. Do you have any sense of it? ‘Cause they obviously want to maintain control in the House. Hopefully they’re gonna get annihilated.

REP. JORDAN: Yeah. No, yeah, hopefully they are, but I think you’re right, Buck, it will be January 6th. I think it starts next week. So, for the first time since Joe Biden’s been in office, Secretary Mayorkas is coming in front of the Judiciary Committee. The Democrats, Jerry Nadler kept him away but he’s final coming next week for a hearing.

So, I think they’re gonna come in and they’re gonna talk about January 6th, and they’re gonna talk about the real threat is white supremacy and all these things that are… So, I think that’s gonna be their play. But I totally agree with you, Buck, that the country gets it. They know what’s happened on the border from secure border to chaos. They know what’s happened with inflation, from stable prices to a 41-year high inflation rate.

They know what’s happened with gas prices. They see what has happened with energy. They see the whole thing, and then of course there’s foreign policy, and there’s the fact that they’ve attacked our liberties and used covid to come after our rights over the last year as well. So, I think the country sees all through it. But my guess is they’ll stick to what they’ve been talking about, which is January 6th.

CLAY: So, here’s the question I also have, Congressman. Now that you see the numbers being as disastrous as they are for the Biden administration, we’re a little bit over six months from the midterms. I think you guys are gonna thankfully be back in the majority in the House, hopefully the Senate, which is a little bit more of a question mark just based on the seats that are up, but hopefully the Senate as well.

REP. JORDAN: Right.

CLAY: So are you concerned at all in Congress now that the Biden administration may see the same tealeaves, may recognize that no matter what they do they’re unlikely to have a congressional majority, so they try to pass — they just ram through — as much crazy government spending, tax increases as they can, knowing that as soon as it gets to be midterm day Biden’s not gonna have those votes in 2023 or 2024, and so they say, “Screw it! Let’s try to get through some of our favored laws ’cause we’re never gonna get ’em otherwise”?

REP. JORDAN: Yeah, no, no, ’cause that’s Democrats. Go back a decade. They pushed through Obamacare knowing it was unpopular at the time. They pushed it through and last mathematically. That’s how Democrats function. In some ways you gotta admire their tenacity for their crazy left-wing beliefs, they actually go for it even knowing that this can cost them a lot of seats. I think sometimes Republicans need to be a little more focused on doing what we told the voters we were gonna do.

So, yeah, I think they’ll do that but remember, too, Biden’s the one who told that, oh, if we spend two trillion more, it’s gonna help us. So they also say stupid things in the country, this is what the left misses. The left always thinks the country… You and I know that your audience and the American people have common sense; they’re smart. There’s a reason that only 30-some percent of the country thinks that we’re on the right track.

We’re all on the wrong track. The country gets it. So they can try all their things. I think there’s gonna be pushback. And you’re beginning to see it. What is it now, nine Democrat Senators have said, “Wait a minute, time out on get rid of Title 42. We see how bad the border situation is. We know it’s gonna get that much worse if you do this.”

So when you got nine senators — some of them from border states — saying that, I think there’s that pushback too; so let’s hope the bad stuff is done. We can hold our own and win back the majority in the House and as you say hopefully win the Senate as well.

BUCK: Speaking to Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio. Congressman, to the point about keeping the faith with your voters and with the American people more broadly, if Republicans take a big majority in the House — and we’re certainly hopeful that it will be not just a majority but one that sends a message, and we’re hoping it will be a message sent specifically on covid lockdowns and the lingering authoritarianism of Fauciism.

What could you and your fellow Republicans do? I obviously know you can’t pass laws that Joe Biden won’t sign. But what can you do in terms of highlighting for the American people the truth and what promises can you make going forward so that when you do have a Republican president, we won’t backslide into the madness that we’ve seen of masking on planes and lockdowns and shutting down schools and all this stuff ’cause we’re gonna have flu seasons’ we’re gonna have covid seasons.

REP. JORDAN: Yeah. I know. In the Judiciary Committee, we’re gonna focus on the Constitution. Remember it was two years ago this month, April 2020, Bill Barr put out a memorandum the U.S. attorney when we were just starting all this stuff with covid. He put out a memorandum and that memorandum said, “The Constitution is not suspended during a crisis,” and amen to that.

And I would actually argue, that, in fact, is when the Constitution is most important. When things get difficult, that’s when the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, the First Amendment matters more than any other time. So we’re gonna focus on that and we’re gonna do our constitutional duty. The oversight and investigation needs to happen and point out all the things Fauci told us that were wrong, starting with the idea that this thing didn’t come from a lab, ’cause it sure looks like it did.

Starting with the idea that he said it wasn’t gain-of-function. It sure looks like it was. And our tax dollars was spent in that lab. So we will focus on that issue, as well as the thing that drives me crazy: This idea that the experts are smarter than all the rest of us. The 51 former intelligence officials — because they have former intelligence officials in front of their name — somehow they’re smarter than the rest of us.

And when they put out a memorandum that says, “Oh, the Hunter Biden story was Russia disinformation,” that somehow that’s the gospel when we all knew it was garbage at the time and we’ve since been proven that it was garbage. So we’ll focus on those kind of things, too, and this idea that these experts are running the country. It is not supposed to work that way in our constitutional system. It’s supposed to be able to the people who put their name on a ballot, run for office, if they get elected, they make the decisions and if they make bad ones we get a chance to throw ’em out so that’s how it’s supposed to work and we’ll focus on that.

CLAY: Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio with us now. I know you’ve been talking a lot about the Hunter Biden investigation that might well ensue with a House controlled by Republicans as well. Buck and I, you may have heard as you’re driving around in your district and traveling, have a bet — a steak bet — on whether or not Hunter Biden is going to face any federal charges.

REP. JORDAN: (chuckles) Yeah.

CLAY: Do you like one side or the other on that steak bet? And what is sort of the consensus conversation now like on Capitol Hill since the Washington Post, the New York Times, even CNN have stopped pretending that this is a made-up recession disinformation laptop, and actually is filled with what seems to be an awful lot of evidence of potentially criminal behavior?

REP. JORDAN: Well, something’s up. You guys know this. You’ve talked about it so well. Something is up, because the Washington Post… I pointed out just a couple weeks ago: The Washington Post did two stories three weeks ago, one at 11 a.m., one at 11:04 a.m. — two eight-page stories, two minutes apart — saying the laptop story was real. Now, whenever you ever seen that? The Washington…

Four minutes apart for goodness’ sake! So when the Washington Post is doing that, something has to be up. Whether that he is getting indicted or someone close, I don’t know. But think how this story has changed. It initially was, “Oh, it wasn’t his laptop;” then it was, “Oh, no, it was his laptop but it was Russian disinformation,” and then it was, “Well, it wasn’t Russian disinformation, but Joe had nothing to do with it,” and now it’s, “Well, Joe had something to do with it, but he didn’t do anything wrong.”

And since that it’s even changed again, which is now some of these emails show, “Oh, James Biden and Joe Biden, and they were written this place and this was part of the business and it was a family enterprise.” So something is certainly up. What that is, I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see what the Justice Department ends up doing.

BUCK: Congressman, just want to ask you what you think the Democrat aligned legacy media’s play is gonna be as we go into a Title 42 dissolution here that everybody… I mean, I was speaking to sources at the border last week, members of Border Patrol that I know and talk to. There’s no doubt that this is gonna create a massive mess at the border.

The latest numbers, by the way, at our southern border include — I’m just seeing here — 32,000 from Cuba, 5,000 from India, almost 2,000 from China, that was among the roughly 250,000 who tried to get in the U.S. just in March. So that’s before Title 42 expires. It’s gonna get a lot bigger after that. What are the Democrats gonna say? What are Democrats in competitive school districts gonna tell people?

REP. JORDAN: Well, the Senator Kelly in Arizona is telling Joe Biden don’t do it, ’cause he’s up for reelection and he’s in a tight race in an important state. So look, last month — March of 2022 — last month was the highest month on record for illegal immigrant encounters on our southern border. And next month they’re gonna make it worse. Now, tell me, where’s the logic there?

I think the fundamental question Mayorkas needs to answer when he comes in front of us is, “Why are you doing this? Why are you intentionally doing this to the country? What is your motivation? Why are you deliberately having it so that we have the worst border situation in the history of United States of America? Why? Why? Intentional, deliberate, why are you doing it?”

So that’s the fundamental question. And Democrats, again, who are in tough seats are saying things ’cause they realize, “Look, if I’m gonna keep my office, we gotta stop this.” And Border Patrol, the people on the border, the ICE agents, they will tell us it’s currently around seven, eight thousand a day, illegal immigrants coming across the border. It’s gonna go to 17/18,000 if we get rid of Title 42. And, again, you can’t have it both ways.

You can’t say, “Oh, we gotta have masks in airports and at the same time we’re getting rid of Title 42 covid with the covid issue on the border.” It makes no sense. But, again, that’s pretty much consistent with the Biden administration. There’s not been one policy they’ve done that made any sense.

CLAY: He is Congressman Jim Jordan. Fantastic. Appreciate the time, as always. Hope to run into you again soon.

REP. JORDAN: All right, take care, guys. Keep it up. Thanks.